The effect of word class on speaker-dependent information in the Standard Dutch vowel /aː/

Linguistic structure co-determines how a speech sound is produced. This study therefore investigated whether the speaker-dependent information in the vowel [aː] varies when uttered in different word classes. From two spontaneous speech corpora, [aː] tokens were sampled and annotated for word class (content, function word). This was done for 50 male adult speakers of Standard Dutch in face-to-face speech (N = 3128 tokens), and another 50 male adult speakers in telephone speech (N = 3136 tokens). First, the effect of word class on various acoustic variables in spontaneous speech was tested. Results showed that [aː]'s were shorter and more centralized in function than content words. Next, tokens were used to assess their speaker-dependent information as a function of word class, by using acoustic-phonetic variables to (a) build speaker classification models and (b) compute the strength-of-evidence, a technique from forensic phonetics. Speaker-classification performance was somewhat better for content than function words, whereas forensic strength-of-evidence was comparable between the word classes. This seems explained by how these methods weigh between- and within-speaker variation. Because these two sources of variation co-varied in size with word class, acoustic word-class variation is not expected to affect the sampling of tokens in forensic speaker comparisons.